Spiritual Home: Bangkok

Slumdog Millionaire's costumer offers her travel guide to the city

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As a child, Suttirat Anne Larlarb—Slumdog Millionaire's acclaimed Thai-American costume designer—spent every summer in Bangkok communing with her foodie Buddhist grandma. This Zen workaholic still returns to the city to renew her un-Hollywood conviction that perfectionism and generosity can coexist. In Bangkok, even gas-station food astonishes and a $45 pedicure is a twohour affair, says the Manhattan-based Larlarb, who's currently costuming Katie Holmes, Paul Dano, and Kevin Kline for 2010's The Extra Man. Here's her hit list.

STAY: At the implausibly gracious Mandarin Oriental, Bangkok, in a nineteenth-century colonial building overlooking the Chao Phraya River. There, Larlarb feels "welcomed in the deepest sense, without that studied, ingratiating niceness of most luxury hotels"—and at nearly half the price of its New York counterpart. If you're flush, stay and write a novel in the Joseph Conrad Suite (mandarinoriental.com/bangkok).

SHOP: For idiosyncratic, minimalist clothing at Greyhound in the Siam Paragon (www.greyhound.co.th) and insider favorite Headquarter (Room 320, Siam Center), two reasons why Larlarb calls Bangkok an "undiscovered hotbed" of fashion; for collectible vintage fabrics at Maya Ethnic Craft (gaysorn.com); for a panoply of finds, such as antique silverware and inadvertently hip instructional posters, among the 15,000 stalls at the "sprawling, heaving, unpredictable" (and often sweltering) Chatuchak open-air weekend market.

COVET: The intimately scaled Jim Thompson House ( jimthompsonhouse.com), lovingly reconstructed from six centuries-old Thai dwellings by the American who revived Bangkok's silk industry then mysteriously disappeared in 1967. It's now a museum and Larlarb's all-teak "dream home."